


(K)Nickers Off Ready When I Come Home

by StarlingGirl



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-18
Updated: 2013-04-18
Packaged: 2017-12-08 20:27:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/765648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarlingGirl/pseuds/StarlingGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky likes to write letters - and Clint likes to invent his own versions of the wartime anagrams he scrawls across them.</p><p>In which Clint receives letters. Most of them good, and one of them bad; the envelope is marked 'SHIELD', and he knows enough to know what's printed on the stiff paper folded inside it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(K)Nickers Off Ready When I Come Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RedRarebit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedRarebit/gifts).



> Unrepentant angst. I'm not even a little bit sorry. There's not enough Winterhawk in the world.

Bucky likes to write letters home, when he's in the back end of God-knows-where, shooting at God-knows-what.

Clint argues that he started it, with the postcards he sends home while he’s away on missions, covered in stupid doodles and containing no pertinent information at all after that one awkward incident in Munich. Bucky points out that he was writing letters home before Clint had even been born. Clint responds that it’s not his fault that time is non-linear and that influence can extend both ways, past and future. Bucky cuffs him upside the head and tell him he’s been spending too much time around Stark; Clint grins his shit-eating grin, and Bucky can’t help but kiss it off his smug little face.

***

Clint’s far too removed from the forties to understand the acronyms that are scrawled across the letters, and he’s too proud to ask Steve (or google) – so he simply passes his days coming up with his own interpretations until Bucky comes home and laughs and explains them.

B.U.R.M.A. was the first, and Clint comes up with ‘barely understands rimming my asshole’, which makes Bucky choke on his drink and has him laughing for five minutes solid until he can correct Clint with “be upstairs ready, my angel”, amusement still dripping from his words. At that, Clint quips 'give me a second' and darts upstairs; Bucky follows hot on his heels and catches him around the waist before he even makes it to the bedroom. Their laughter echoes through their apartment before it's replaced with happy love-murmurings.

I.T.A.L.Y. is next, and Clint decides it’s ‘I totally appreciate licking you’; when Bucky tells him it’s ‘I’m thinking about loving you’ he argues that his interpretation was close enough and licks a stripe up Bucky's neck, which is returned in kind, tongue followed by lips and teeth and murmurs of 'I missed you' pressed into Clint's hot skin.

S.W.A.L.K. he knows, everyone knows, and he spares a moment to imagine Bucky actually sealing the envelope with a loving kiss with an idiotic grin on his face before he gets a hold of himself and tries to come up with a suitable alternative. He struggles for a while with the K, discovers that they don't own a dictionary or even a thesaurus, and then gives up; Bucky acts disappointed when he arrives home and Clint leers at him and offers to “make it up to him”. Bucky can’t even pretend to resist before Clint’s pulling down his zipper and dropping to his knees.

("Sometimes we all like kneeling," he exclaims breathlessly at some point; Bucky laughs and twists his fingers a little in Clint's hair, and Clint's all to happy to resume his previous activity.)

B.O.L.T.O.P. is squeezed in next to a sentence about how hard Bucky’s going to kiss Clint when he’s finally home; Clint translates it as ‘blowjobs or lapdances: thought of persistently’. Bucky agrees that Clint’s version is actually an improvement on ‘better on lips than on paper’, and Clint rewards him with one of each of the aforementioned things.

H.O.L.L.A.N.D. he has plenty of time to think on.

‘How often ladies like all-naked dances’

Or

‘He only licked labias at night, dear’

Or

‘Help! One lonely lover always needs dick’

They get more and more lewd, and more and more ridiculous and it doesn’t matter, because he’s known something was off from the day Bucky was scheduled to return. ‘Complications’, Coulson tells him, but Clint knows him well enough to hear the anxiety in his voice.

And then he gets another letter.

It is just a formality, and when Bucky had been filling in that form - "'Who would you like to be informed in case of death or serious injury'? What, they think I have friends?" - he'd shrugged and scrawled 'Clint Barton' across the box and remarked with a chuckle that if Clint didn't know in the first place anyway, then there's probably bigger problems at hand.

Coulson watches him wearily as he reads it, but Clint merely laughs and shakes his head. He goes home, he re-reads the letters that he’s kept (every single one) and murmurs to himself in the darkness that Bucky’s just not home yet, just complications, just a few more days. The bed stays cold and empty and far too big, and Clint waits every day for the knock on the door that doesn’t come.

***

It’s a week before he breaks, and then there is shouting and crying and screaming and punching; there’s fighting the people who are his friends and fighting the people who are Bucky’s friends, and fighting Coulson and Fury and Maria, and spitting blame like poison.

***

It’s on the morning of the funeral, as SHIELD prepare to bury an empty coffin, that he hands the envelope to Steve with trembling hands and asks the question that's been burrowing its way into his mind.

"What does it mean?" he asks, voice hoarse from tears and shouts and accusations.

Steve trails a finger across the letters on the paper and smiles a little shakily before pressing the envelope back into Clint’s hands. There's tears in Steve's eyes, and that shouldn't make Clint angry, but it does. He is selfish in his grief.

“Hope our love lasts and never dies,” Steve murmurs.

And Clint cries, because the universe is cruel.

***

He takes a folded piece of paper to the service, and drops it on the dark, gleaming wood settled in the damp earth after they have handed him a flag, tightly folded. There is only one word on the paper, printed carefully and a little shakily in Clint’s firm hand.

M.A.L.A.Y.A.

_My ardent lips await your arrival._

Because Clint knows that his life now, such as it is, is merely a waiting game. The pastor says that James Barnes is in a better place, and Bucky would have said the same himself. And so Clint bargains with a God he’s not quite sure he believes in.

He promises life and limb and the pursuit of virtue and regret of sin if he can kiss Bucky’s lips once last time; if he can merely reach through those pearly gates he’s heard so much about and brush his fingers against his lover’s.

Clint has never been a patient man. But for Bucky, he will wait.


End file.
